A photolithographic process in a manufacture of a semiconductor device includes a resist coating step that forms a resist film on the surface of a semiconductor wafer, an exposing step that exposes the resist-coated semiconductor wafer with a predetermined pattern, and a developing step that develops the exposed resist. The substrate, which has been subjected to the series of process steps, is then subjected to a macro defect inspection in which the substrate is inspected by an inspecting apparatus that inspects whether or not a predetermined film has been suitably formed on the surface of the substrate, whether or not the substrate has been suitably exposed, and whether or not there are damages or particles on the substrate.
As described in JP2007-240519A, in the macro defect inspection, an imaging device such as a CCD line sensor is relatively moved with respect to a stage on which a substrate is placed, and the substrate is imaged by the imaging device. Then, by processing the image, whether any defect exists or not is judged.
In one photolithographic process, on a semiconductor wafer W shown in FIG. 6(a), a base film 50 (FIG. 6(b)) is formed, then on which a resist film 51 (FIG. 6(b)) is formed, and then on which a top coat film 52 (FIG. 6(d)) is formed, whereby a stacked layer structure is formed. When the macro defect inspection is performed before the exposing step, the surface of the wafer W having thereon multiple films is imaged, from above, by an imaging device such as a CCD camera, thereby obtaining image data D as shown in FIG. 7. The obtained image data D is subjected to image data processing, whereby a defect 60 is detected.
However, in the micro defect inspection, even thought the defect 60 can be detected based on the image data D, it is impossible to determine which film among the base film 50, the resist film 51 and the top coat film 52 has the defect 60. Thus, it takes a lot of time to judge whether the defect is critical or not and to find out a cause of the defect, resulting in serious adverse affect on the productivity.